Hon Peter Dunne

Associate Minister of Health

6 April 2016 Speech

Launch of the New Zealand Drug Harm Index

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Parliamentary colleagues and visitors to Parliament Buildings.

I am delighted to host this launch of the New Zealand Drug Harm Index 2016.

I would like to begin by acknowledging that funding for this project to reproduce a Drug Harm Index for New Zealand was approved by the Prime Minister from the proceeds of crime.

We published the first drug harm index for New Zealand back in 2008, so it was somewhat timely to revise the methodology used to estimate the harm caused by illegal drugs.

Our Australian colleagues across the Tasman have been better at maintaining and developing iterations of their drug harm index.

Therefore, I was very pleased to learn that the Ministry of Health and the National Drug Intelligence Bureau were able to convince Dr Michael McFadden to take on this project.

A very warm welcome to you, Michael.

You bring a wealth of experience with you.

Michael has been involved in four versions of the Australian Drug Harm Index, and we have certainly benefited from that experience.

Michael has also introduced some exciting innovations to the New Zealand drug harm index, which I think will advance the way we think about the extent of harms caused by illegal drugs, and how we can best respond to those harms.

The main purpose for the development of any drug harm index is to help measure the social impact of government policies in relation to illicit drugs.

Nearly all public sector agencies have struggled with measuring the social impact of their programmes.

This is hardly surprising given that those programmes operate in complex environments.

However, by better understanding the social impact of our policies, we can better inform social investment.

Social investment is one of the key tools the Government has to drive changes in the community.

As the Minister of Finance Bill English has said, at its heart, social investment is about understanding what makes the most difference to people’s lives, and using evidence to do more of what works.

The social investment approach fits squarely with the evidence based approach which lies at the heart of the National Drug Policy.

Publicising data and increasing the transparency of the costs of illegal drugs and the benefits of what we do means more people can come to an informed view about the illegal drug market.

And it also means that, armed with this information, we can tailor our policy responses much more specifically to measures that have a more than reasonable chance of working, rather than just things we think might work.

I also propose to present the Index at the upcoming UN Special Session on drugs being held in New York in a couple of weeks’ time, where I have no doubt there will be significant interest in our approach.

This new Drug Harm Index will be refined over time as new evidence comes to hand so it will remain relevant and up to date.

The original New Zealand and Australian drug harm indexes provided law enforcement agencies with a way of reporting drug seizure activity in a single meaningful number represented in dollar terms.

We can now recognise that a single index is also of great value in tracking the total harm caused by illicit drugs, using measures such as mortality, morbidity, drug–related crime and so on.

This new drug harm index fulfils both purposes.

The New Zealand Drug Harm Index can be found atwww.health.govt.nz

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